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OXPO WORKING PAPERS 2012-13
Archives, memory and ‘traces’
The use of the archives as telling ‘something of the past’1
Christine Chivallon
Research Director,
LAM-CNRS,
(Les Afriques dans le Monde)
Sciences Po Bordeaux,
e-mail: [email protected]
Work in Progress
Please do not cite without permission of the author
1 - This paper was written during a visiting fellowship (Oxpo Programme) at Nuffield College,
University of Oxford, Trinity term 2013. It was presented at the international workshop Utopian
Archives: Pasts and Futures, University of East Anglia, Wednesday 15 – Friday 17 May 2013, School
of Art History and World Art Studies. It served as a basis for an article written in July 2013 to be
submitted under the title « The New Lives of the Archives: The Use of the Archives as Telling
‘Something of the Past » to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), issue edited by
Ferdinand de Jong & Paul Basu (still in the process of reviewing, February 2014)
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ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to question the status of archives as well as their epistemological
and ontological possibilities in testifying on ‘something of the past’. It develops a
reflection that combines the results of an anthropological research that was done in
Martinique on the memory of slavery, with the theoretical contributions of the
Martiniquan writer, Édouard Glissant and the philosopher, Paul Ricoeur. Each one
of them, using different means, offers to consider memory as the matrix of a
historical condition. The ‘traces’ of living memory supplant the documents of
archives by their capacity to give access to the marks that past and present events
make on memorial expressions today. The descendants of insurgents, the
protagonists of an anticolonial uprising that took place in Martinique in the 19th
century, and who were the major characters of the research on the memory of
slavery, make it possible to question these concepts in the situated field of memorial
practices. Their experience is an indication of a memory attached to the “souvenirs”
(memories) of the founding setting of violence, just as much as it shows how the
access to archives gives the latter a new lease of life filled with subjectivity and
emotions that it ought to isolate.
● Introduction
In the very stimulating presentation of the series of seminars on “Utopian Archives:
Pasts and Futures”, I have selected the aim which questions the extent to which past
events can leave traces and how these events can be traced through documents2. This
2 - In the proposal of the seminar, this aim was formulated in the following terms : “One of the
interesting questions in archival research is to what extent events leave “traces”. How can events be
“traced” through documents? How do such documents thereby constitute the archive as a monument
to the sovereign state ? (…) How can postcolonial futures be imagined through alternative archives?
Can popular culture and forms of embodied knowledge constitute such alternative archives?” (F. De
Jong, P. Basu et D. Murphy, collaborative project on the postcolonial archive : “Utopian Archives:
Excavating Pasts for Postcolonial Futures’. Proposal of the workshop ‘Utopian Archives: Pasts and
Futures’, University of East Anglia, 15-17 May 2013).
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fits very well the recent research that I have conducted in the French Caribbean on
memory of slavery. This research mainly done in Martinique has dealt both, with the
idea of alternative readings of archives and with the idea of the possibility of the
constitution of alternative documents considered as traces of the historical condition.
In this paper, I would want to explore the status of the archives for which the
classical definition and localization is powerfully destabilized by Caribbean writers
such as Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau or Dereck Walcott. I would want to
consider that this Caribbean deconstruction of the concepts of archives and history
suits very well the path followed by those - like the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and
the historian Michel de Certeau - who do not consider the archives anymore as a
place to read the past, but as a trace among many others, neither true, nor false,
always resulting from a form of materialization of representations located in space
and time and calling for a careful hermeneutic approach. Furthermore, all these
authors share a conception in terms of “traces” of memory through which
phenomenological experience remains the basis “to know something of the past”.
● Presentation of the research on memory of slavery conducted in
Martinique
Before developing this idea, I would like to present the research from which I
propose to enter the debate on archives. This anthropological research aimed at
looking for various forms of memory of slavery which could be different from those
associated with the recent apparition of the public and political claim for
constructing a memory of slavery through commemorative and heritage practices
(Chivallon 2010, 2012). The starting point has somewhat been given by the public
debate around this unexpected claim, particularly in the French context. Caribbean
cultures and societies belong to those postcolonial experiences where “silencing the
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past” has been the official modality of writing History, showing “the differential
exercice of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others” (Trouillot
1995 : 25). During the two last decades, the heritage machine – the “making past
visible” – has given way to a situation which – to take the words of Paul Ricoeur
(1998) - has dramatically moved from a “not enough memory” to a “too much
memory”. This memory boom has led to what I have called in my work a “moral
economy of suspicion” where this “new” memory is morally, scientifically and
politically discredited (Chivallon 2012 : 62). Coming both from politicians and
academics - mainly historians as for example Pierre Nora (2008) - this suspicion
identifies this new category and practice of “memory of slavery” as having been
spontaneously created and specifically invented and instrumentalized only to serve
the present, with no living links with the past, as if it was only an artificial and
utilitarian memory. The fundamental question left aside in this debate is : what is the
meaning of representations of the past for those who are neither experts in the
construction of memory, nor “memory-makers”, nor activists or politicians but
rather individuals and members of the different Caribbean groups evolving in the
intimate family frame of the experience linked to the past of slavery ? Is there an
inter-generational circulation of knowledge on slavery and on its legacy ?
Taking these debates and these questions as a starting point, my aim has been to
interrogate memories and traces of slavery as a cognitive knowledge under the
notion of souvenir which as a specific meaning in French close to “remembrance”. I
shall come back to this notion. My objective was not to find a “true” memory to
replace the one being accused of being invented, but to approach expressions of
memory without any concern for verification and suspicion, only through the
testimonies of those belonging to what the Jamaican anthropologist David Scott calls
a structure of recognition, identification and subjectivation aimed at producing the
colonial or postcolonial subject as a “black [subject] in and through raced relations,
ideological apparatuses and political regimes” (Scott 1997 : 36).
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I do not want to enter details of this research in terms of fieldwork and final
interpretation. I limit myself to say that I have mainly worked on an historical event
that revives the framework of the original master/slave conflict, namely an
insurrection against the colonial order which took place in Martinique in 1870. My
intention was to follow the traces of this event by doing a kind of circular movement
from the present to the past and return to the present to describe the memory
processes this violent and tragic event generated.
I have worked on several materials, including archives, to reconstitute the rebellion
and its aftermath. The accounts from the descendants of the rebels have been the
masterpiece of this “trying to follow the path of a souvenir” of a traumatic event.
They have helped to put forward a large spectrum of historical facts which I do not
separate from memory, on the contrary. These narratives give the testimony of
family knowledge which has been transmitted until this day. The forms taken by
these intimate stories are those of hidden and clandestine narratives which are only
shared in family circles. These forms are directly related to the consequences of the
repression of the rebellion. Until very recently, the descendants of the insurgents
have been stigmatized as criminals, traitors to the French Republican Nation. The
trial of the insurgents has been the place of a staging to transfigure the act of a
collective revolt into a criminal case in order to reinforce the vision of the Republic as
being generous towards colonial subjects seen as children who have still to learn the
virtues of civilization. The narratives are explicitly based on this shared “primal
scene”. Without having lived this event, today’s generations continue to be
identified by it and to identify themselves through it. This situation allows them to
take the place of witnesses, a place which, of course, has never been seen as such,
insofar as it has been discredited, and silenced.
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● The non-history : the absence of ruins/history and the refusal of
archives.
I now come to develop the idea on the deconstruction of the archives as a tool for
knowing something of the past. If my research started with “the moral economy of
suspicion”, it came also from the way in which the anthropology of the Caribbean
has confronted the memory of slavery. Until the late nineties, it was generally
admitted that no memories were capable of emerging from the experience of slavery.
Furthermore anthropologists were more preoccupied with attesting of what
remained truly African in Americas, than with questioning the memory of the
slaving past. In 2005, the historian Joseph Adjaye (2005) could still speak of a field
which has put aside the questions of what does it mean to remember or to forget
about slavery and what does it mean to construct memories of suffering and caring
on the basis of such an oppressive experience which remains the very foundation of
Caribbean societies.
The idea of a traumatic and permanent dispossession which has blocked the process
of being conscious of the past has been very influential. The metaphor of the poet
Derek Walcott on the “absence of ruins” has provided one the most powerful
conception to think of consciousness, memory and history3. For Walcott, History
cannot exist for the slaves and theirs descendants. No ruins could be identified, no
heroic palace, no monument, not a single material element through which it is
possible to access history. And even, if he does not explicitly refer to them, these
materials include the famous archives. Walcott says that “the sigh of History rises
over ruins, not over landscapes”, and in the Caribbean, “there are few ruins to sigh
3 - According to the famous title of Dereck Walcott’s poem : “The Royal Palms. . . an absence of ruins”,
first published in The London Magazine, 1(11), 1962 : 12-13.
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over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates” (Walcott, 1992). This is the reason why he
states that “the slave surrendered to amnesia [and] that amnesia is the true history of
the New World” (Walcott quoted by R. & S. Price 1997 : 5). This metaphor has been
used by many social scientists. The sociologist Orlando Patterson makes it clear
when he says : “The most critical feature of the West Indian consciousness is what
Derek Walcott calls "an absence of ruins." The most important legacy of slavery is the
total break, not with the past so much as with a consciousness of the past. To be a
West Indian is to live in a state of utter pastlessness” (Patterson quoted by R&S Price
1997 : 6).
This conception is very close to the one developed by the Martinican writer Édouard
Glissant who speaks of the loss of collective memory, of an obscurity of the past, and
finally of an impossible memory. The past has not been lived but suffered,
destroying the social life and the possibility of the sedimentation of a collective
knowledge. As Walcott, Glissant in Le Discours Antillais (1981) - Caribbean Discourse
(1992) - mixes together history and memory. His point of departure is the idea that
Caribbean subjects live in a state of “non-history”, made of “ruptures”,
“contraction”, “shock”, “painful negation”, “explosive forces” and “dispossession”
(Glissant 1992 [1981] : 62). The historical consciousness is unable to arise. The
negative factor of this non-history is therefore the erasure of the collective memory :
“the dislocation of the continuum and the inability of the collective consciousness to
absorb it” (ibid.).
To sum it up, if there is no history, there is no memory. But Glissant becomes more
and more aware of the confusion between two ways of positioning oneself in time
through the notions of history and memory. Here, he could have used the concept of
régime d’historicité (“regime of historicity”) as stated by Marcel Détienne to define
« the modalities of self-consciousness that each and every society adopts in its
construction of time and its perception of the past » (Détienne 2008 [2000] : 41). If, as
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Ricoeur says, all individuals are necessarily living in an historical condition – “the
ontology of historical being” (Ricoeur 2004 [2000] : 280) - it does not mean that
History is the only way to represent the past. It is simply one regime of historicity
among others, the very operative concept of the West. In denouncing the vacuum of
history and in regretting the absence of history, Glissant nourishes the interpretation
in terms of alienation which was widely used until the end of the 1980s, particularly
in the French Caribbean. But this interpretation only makes sense by comparing it to
European culture. In these conditions, the lack of memory could only be a lack of
History. The novelist Patrick Chamoiseau, who shares the same conceptual approach
as Edouard Glissant, will finally assert that their thoughts had been blinded to their
own conditions because until that time they have been reading their historical past
only through the lens of the French colonist. They were looking for a Nation, history,
territory, roots for themselves as a simple reversal of Western modernity
(Chamoiseau 1997). In Le discours antillais (1981), Édouard Glissant already begins to
deconstruct the concept of History to see it as a pure invention of the West and to
claim to recover the complexity of a vision of the past which is not the concern of
those who use the analytic categories of “History” (“with a capital H” as he put it).
“History is a highly functional fantasy of the West originating at precisely the time
when it alone ‘made’ the history of the World” (Glissant 1992 [1981] : 64).
● Traces rather than archives to recover memories of the past
It is at this time that Glissant brings into play one of the fundamental notions of his
conception, the notion of “traces”, sadly translated by “signs” in Glissant (1992 : 64).
The “traces” are all those expressions of being in the world under the conditions of
oppression, without being able to stabilize oneself, except through tricks,
transgression, and what De Certeau (1990 [1980] : 62) would call “tactics”. The traces
of memory are obscure, nearly invisible because they have been forced to silence and
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secrecy. The writer, the poet, or the novelist is in charge of finding these traces :
“Because historical memory was too often erased, the Caribbean writer has to delve
deeper into memory from the traces – sometimes latent – that he has identified in the
reality” (Glissant 1981 : 133, with my own translation).
Needless to say, it is not in the colonial archives that those traces could be found.
Glissant’s conception makes a divide between the archive and traces. He uses this
term only once in the Caribbean Discourse (1992 [1981]) to suggest that archive is a
tool to produce the univocity, and to make disappear the diversity of the world. The
archive deals with “the universalizing influence of Sameness” since “the oral would
be the organized manifestation of Diversity” (Glissant 1992 [1981] : 100). For the
historian Adjaye (2005), the traces of the Caribbean memory of slavery - for which,
as we have seen, he thinks that they have been neglected by anthropology – are also
located not in the archives seen as recording obsession of the administrative colonial
regime, but in interstitial spaces which have to be uncovered.
Through this refusal to see the archives as a tool to reveal the past of the colonial
subjects and approach their memories, it is the formal conception of the archives
which is rejected. It is true that it will be hard to deny that archives belong to the
western utopia of ruling space and time, and, as Glissant would say, of producing
the history of the whole world from one location. The statements about the archives
as a powerful component of the western hegemony are now widely accepted. The
positivist use of the archives as a proof of the transparency of the past has declined,
at least in the many circles in which to practice history goes hand in hand with a
deep epistemological concern. During the two last decades, there has been a
dramatic growth in literature with the so-called “archival turn” where the tone has
been set by the influential contribution of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
The evocative title of his book - “Archival fever” (Derrida 1995) – could be
considered as nearly performative or visionary since it has been followed by a real
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academic “fever”. On this point, I shall only retain the always stimulating
interpretations of Achille Mbembe (2002) when he defines archives not as a piece of
data but as a status (Mbembe 2002 : 20). A status which makes possible to classify, to
select, to order the world and above all to act as proof attesting that a truly life
existed. Archives are only powerful because of their materiality and their visible
embodiment into documents, records, and physical spaces where all these written
traces are kept. And, as Mbembe says, if this materiality allows to think of something
of the past as being true and real, “the final destination of the archive is always
situated outside its own materiality, in the story that it makes possible” (ibid : 21). It
is the reason why archives function as an “instituting imaginary”, colonial imaginary
of domination and racialization in the case of the Caribbean.
Alongside Paul Ricoeur (2004 [2000]), who is not at all a specialist of colonial history,
insists also on the material dimension of the building where archives are located. To
put aside documents is a way of cutting the testimony from the living memory, to
prevent the irruption of the testimony as something which could by transmitted by
the voice intended to be heard by someone. The archive does not admit traces as
being cerebral, emotional or affective, or intended to be in a dialogue with anybody.
In other words, the archive is a “promise [which] has not and cannot be kept”
(Ricoeur 2004 [2000] : 275) since “The moment of the archive is the moment of the
entry into writing of the historiographical operation. Testimony is by origin oral. It is
listened to, heard. The archive is written. It is read, consulted. In archive, the
professional historian is a reader” (ibid. : 166). In this “institution of knowledge” the
document remains “silent” and even “orphan” deprived of “the hearsay of oral
testimony”. It is the reason why the archive “constitutes the first historical mutation
in living memory” (ibid. 167)
To come back to Caribbean thinkers and to Glissant in particular, we have seen that
it is to the writer that the role of finding the traces of memory is attributed. In that
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case, the question is : what could be the difference between the writer and the
historian once historians and philosophers themselves have deconstructed the
practice of writing history and its belief in the proof brought by the archives. Michel
de Certeau (1975) has suggested that history can no longer be seen as detached from
the written discourses of the historians as practices which necessarily transform
what is called “the reality”. It is by confronting the illusion and the fiction of a
unifying historiographical meta-language that historians can have access to the
limits of their own discourses. For De Certeau (1975), as for Paul Ricoeur (2004
[2000]), history remains founded on the terrible aporia of the absence of the past,
what Ricoeur calls “the enigma of a present representation of the absent past’ (ibid. :
511). Knowledge of the past necessarily involves representations, no events. In Paul
Ricoeur’s conception, what are called “historical facts” as those found in archives are
themselves representations of events. And if a “past event” has to be the reality, the
reality of this event also corresponds to the assertion of some representations (ibid. :
279). Such approaches of history bring us far from the utopian status of archives as
being able to recover the transparency and the objectivity of the past by virtue of
reading them.
Here again, what can be found in archives is the limit of historical knowledge, and
history itself as a concept to be deconstructed. Of course, this conception has a lot of
in common with the claim of Édouard Glissant. This is why I would say that there is
no difference between writing about traces and writing about, not History, but about
the historical condition once the work on archives is animated by a continuing
questioning of its status, which, in the case of Martinique means both, epistemic
deconstruction of archives and epistemic decolonization of knowledge from
archives.
The proximity between the conceptions of Édouard Glissant and Paul Ricoeur is
even stronger and more amazing, when Ricoeur considers the action of recovering
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something of the past as a multi-situated practice involving what he calls
alternatively documents or “traces” (Ricoeur 2004 [2000] : 278), including material
space, testimonies, archives. And surprisingly enough, living memory and
testimonies are for Ricoeur the matrix of what could be still called history. That is to
say that there is nothing more valuable than memory to speak about what does not
exist anymore. He brings this argument to the point where he presents his book “as a
plea on behalf of memory as the womb of history, inasmuch as memory remains the
guardian of the entire problem of the representative relation of the present to the
past’ (Ricoeur 2004 [2000]: 87). The notion of “souvenir” (remembrance) is at the
heart of his conception. Remembering is the masterpiece of the memory of the
historical condition because it brings a cognitive trace of something which has
happened. It is the result of the cognitive experience – “the cerebral and affective
trace” (ibid. : 167) - something which has been lived in the past, which has left an
imprint, and which is recalled today through imagination. No archive could replace
the living “souvenir” and the voices by which it continues to circulate. “To put it
bluntly, we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken
place, has occurred, has happened before we declare that we remember it” (ibid. :
21). And again, Glissant and Ricoeur meet since Glissant considers that writing on
traces of the past - if it has not to become an archive - has to remain irrigated by oral
transmission, the word and voices.
Therefore, the project promoted by Glissant and Ricoeur follow the same path to
discover on one hand what has been oppressed and silenced for Glissant (the “non-
history”, the “obscured history” or “the erasing of the collective memory”), and on
the other hand what has been discredited as non-historical for Ricoeur (the memory).
But both of them remain writers and both of them know how writing contains the
risk of a rupture with memory, of fixing what is proclaimed to have values insofar as
it remains alive. Both confront in fact the old and still relevant distinction made by
Maurice Halbawchs between historical memory and collective memory, the first
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being a voluntary practice to restore what has been lost, the second continuing to
make possible the circulation of knowledge on the collective trajectory. No doubt
that the approach of Ricoeur and Glissant fits a project of historical memory. If
archives and memories find new locations where testimonies displace the authority
of history, the intention to recover the past – through writing - still remains
separated from the livingness of the historical condition. Does Glissant address the
challenge that he clearly states : “For the only way, to my mind, of maintening a
place for writing (if this can be done) – that is, to remove it from being an esoteric
practice or a banal reserve of information – would be to nourish it with the oral”
(Glissant 1992 [1981] : 101). And does Ricoeur resolve the aporia of “the scriptural
phase” which is the beginning of the loss of the living memory or, as for the archive,
“a mutation in living memory” (Ricoeur 2004 [2000] : 168) ?
● Conclusion : memories making archives alive
To return to the research which has inspired these arguments, and it will be my
conclusive comment, another perspective emerges. It comes from the experience of
the archives by the interlocutors of this research, namely the descendants of the
insurgents. Some of them have had an access to the documents that I have brought
from the National French Library to the local village in Martinique. These
documents were principally recordings of the Court concerning the trial of their
ancestors. The use of the archives by the descendants concerns one aspect that
Achille Mbembe has briefly described when he speaks of the subjective experience of
the archive by individuals. I completely agree with him when he says that “however
we define archives, they have no meaning outside the subjective experience of those
individuals who, at a given moment, come to use them. It is this subjective
experience that places the limits on the supposed power of the archives revealing
their uselessness and their residual and superfluous nature” (Mbembe 2002 : 23).
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In using the archives the descendants of the insurgents do not search for new
knowledge of the past. Sharing an awareness of having been the keepers of stories
against the dominant colonial narrative, they are not ready to believe the content of
the archives. Reading them, they find a mean to reinforce the counter-memory that
circulates through the family ties. A person’s name, a name of a place, a brief
description of a situation can be enough to continue restoring the figure of the
ancestors, to allow them to recover the dignity of the oppressed fighting against the
colonial order. It is the irony of archives to be read today in an unexpected way, to
make sense of what records were intended to prove irrational.
Through the archives, the descendants follow the opposite path of Ricoeur and
Glissant. For the writing here is a way to keep the past alive and to nourish
narratives which are not ready to be abandoned to the authority of any historical
written account. Remembrance is stronger, which in a way, proves that Ricoeur is
right when he argues for a knowledge of the past based on the cognitive experience
of the events of the past. But this has not to be naively and romantically stated as a
victorious counter-narrative against postcolonial narrative of the sovereign state. If
as we are invited to think of it, the status of archives has to be enlarged and to be
used as a metaphor of all what embodies something of the past, this should not be
done with abandoning the place where the (post)colonial archives stood and
continue to authoritatively stand. Or, to say it in the words of the description of the
project of this seminar, alternative traces can be found in popular culture, and
alternative past can be extracted from conventional archive to support postcolonial
utopias of ordinary memories, but without deteriorating the very basis of the old
“institution of knowledge” able to reproduce itself through more and more
sophisticated digital apparatuses.
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